Axis powers

Axis powers, the coalition headed by Germany, Italy, and Japan that opposed the Allied powers in World War II. The alliance originated in a series of agreements between Germany and Italy, followed by the proclamation of an “axis” binding Rome and Berlin (October 25, 1936), with the two powers claiming that the world would henceforth rotate on the Rome-Berlin axis. This was followed by the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union (November 25, 1936).

World War II: Axis Powers in the 1930sThe 1930s consisted of many individual but significant events that bound the Axis Powers and culminated in a world war.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Hostile acts of expansionism by the three countries during the 1930s sowed the seeds of world war. Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia on October 3, 1935. Imperial Japan, which had occupied Manchuria (Northeast China) since 1931, engaged Chinese troops near Beijing on July 7, 1937, thus launching full-scale warfare there. Nazi Germany occupied the Rhineland in 1937 and annexed Austria and the Sudetenland the following year. The connections among the Axis powers were strengthened by a full military and political alliance between Germany and Italy (the Pact of Steel, May 22, 1939) and by the Tripartite Pact, signed by all three powers on September 27, 1940, one year after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. During the war a number of other countries joined the Axis, induced by coercion or promises of territory or protection by the Axis powers. They included Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia (after Czechoslovakia had divided in 1939) in November 1940, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in March 1941, and, after the wartime breakup of Yugoslavia, Croatia (June 1941). Finland, although it did not formally join the Tripartite Pact, cooperated with the Axis because of its opposition to the Soviet Union (to which Finland had been forced to cede territory in 1940) and entered the war in 1941.